I am indebted to David "Davy" Robert Hayward-Jones Bowie who inspired
this conversation.

David "Davy" Robert Hayward-Jones Bowie

There's the seminal tale of the monk in a
monastery,
a student of
Zen
who goes for an audience with his
master,
a very wise man over a hundred years old, and asks him
"Master,
do we have choice in the matter of our own
death?".
The
Zenmaster
looks at him with total compassion, yet just
sits
there saying
nothing.
Then all of a sudden, startling the student, he yells out very
loudly "KAAAAA!" ... and
dies
- just like that. And that, it's said, is one of the hallmarks of a
truly great
master:
someone who can stage-manage even their own
death.

When he unexpectedly announced he was retiring, many of his
millions
and
millions
of
worldwide
fans
cried
-
tears
of shock. It was a nearly inconceivable loss. Then, after almost
completely disappearing for a
decade,
he came back, totally unexpectedly, with one of his most awesome
studio albums ever, The
Next
Day, and the same now elated fans
cried
again -
tears
of joy this time. Then, in short order, he produced
anotherbreakthrough
album ★ (pronounced Blackstar, arguably his
masterpiece) along with accompanying
videos
which stylishly depicted his own
death,
released them on his sixty-ninth birthday, then
died
two days later (did he yell "KAAAAA!"? I sure hope so ...) (it's OK
to
cry
-
tears
of
love
and gratitude).

I was flipping through TV channels, not paying
attention
... then suddenly I was bolt upright:
"news
had just come over"*
he had
died.
If you had been in that room with me, you would have seen and heard
me groan. He never let on this was coming for eighteen months, yet
had prepared for it
masterfully.
Ain't that just like him?

I'm not going to repeat here everything that every
newspaper
and news program on the
planet
(print,
online,
and broadcast) has already copiously lavished on him. And to be
sure, I'm not a
music
critic (I've
listened
most of his records - but certainly not all of them). What I
would like to say something about, is what in my
view
made him outlandishlyextraordinary
as a human being in a genre in which merely
being
extraordinary
is simply the token required to get in through the turnstile.

He was outlandish in three
ways.
The first is very early in life, he
discovered and embraced Life's
creativity
switch which he gleefully threw to the
full on
position, and once he had it there, he never shut it back down for one
instant. The second is he always expressed his multi-faceted
true nature
in the veritable
tsunami
of his
art
which resulted. And third, to hold all of our
interests
(which wasn't ever really necessary since
who he was
was enough to keep us mesmerized, but he did it anyway), he constantly
changed the
medium
in which he
worked
from one rock genre to another, from one fashion mode to another, from
one look to another, from one role to another
(yes, stage and film
acting
too) and then back again, mixing and matching at will and yet
totallyoriginal.
And through it all, he always managed to keep himself from getting in
the
way
of his own
creativity
so that his became the
creativity
of
Life itself,
to the point where you couldn't tell the difference. He did all that
... and ... he had an absolute blast doing it. That's what
made him so awesome to so many: his was the job we all desire, yet one
we resign ourselves to never having.

And as if all that wasn't enough, he was a dedicated and fiercely
private
family
man, a very sweet person by all accounts who was also
brilliant
both technically and financially with a wonderful and
wicked sense of humor, a
100 watt light bulb
smile, of course ridiculously talented, and endowed with
such exquisite good looks and
otherworldly
poise that (as the old saying goes) all women wanted to be
with him, and all men wanted to be like
him (and some men wanted to be with him too).